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Top1. Introduction
The role of agriculture in a country’s economic development cannot be overemphasized. For example, agriculture is a major contributor to South Africa’s GDP as seen in Figure 1, where value added from agriculture between 2009 and 2018 is illustrated (Department of Agriculture, 2018). The trend of a GDP has a huge impact on a country’s development and indicates whether the economy is expanding by producing more goods and services, or contracting due to less output. Hence, sustaining agricultural production is important for any country. Moreover, the agriculture sector offers great potential for poverty alleviation and job creation, particularly among vulnerable rural communities and urban dwellers with limited job opportunities.
Figure 1. Value added from agriculture (R’ million) between 2009 and 2018
In South Africa, land reform is currently one of the major topics at the forefront of the National Development Plan (NDP) and Vision 2030 (South African Government. National Development Plan 2030, n.d.). This requires careful intervention to avoid unintended consequences that will impede production in the agricultural industry. Moreover, one of the propositions of the NDP is to ensure sustainable production on transferred land by making sure that human capabilities precede land transfer through incubators, learnerships, mentoring, apprenticeships and accelerated training in agricultural sciences. With the emergence and development of immersive technology, some of the challenges of land reform can be addressed. Immersive technology is an enabling technology that offers smart and sustainable choices on agricultural learnerships, training and productivity (Katsaro, 2017; Zheng and Campbell, 2019). However, limited developments and applications of immersive technology in agriculture is impeding its adoption rate, and consequently the education and productivity of farmers. Hence, this research presents a novel immersive technology solution that affords learners and naive farm workers, with limited access to a physical tractor, to learn and interact with the different exterior and engine components of a tractor. There are existing applications in the form of farming games (Giants Software. n.d.) and virtual tractor driving simulators (Ojados et al., 2017). However, none of the existing research focuses on breaking apart a tractor model and engine to explore and learn about component names and their functions.